Hill & Plain students connect with traveler to Antarctica

News-Times, The (Danbury, CT)

Published
8:00 pm EDT, Thursday, June 3, 2004

On Thursday, they met the woman whose six-month journey they charted through e-mails.
Sacchetti, 30, spoke to the classes Thursday morning, meeting some of the students with whom she has been corresponding during the school year.
Sacchetti, whose mother, Christine, teaches first grade at the school, left her home base in Mobile, Ala., last Oct. 26, in a helicopter bound for Seattle.
Along the way, Sacchetti, a helicopter pilot, stopped in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.
Before her mission to Antarctica, Sacchetti went on search and rescue missions, once to northern California to rescue a firefighter during a wildfire, for which she received a commendation.
Accompanied by a stuffed penguin named Joe, a gift from the class, Sacchetti took photos of her adventures, which she compiled into a PowerPoint presentation.
"You'll get to see a lot this morning," Sacchetti told the students, who had made a sign welcoming her. Students also gave her a T-shirt reading "Ask Me About Penguins," and a bouquet of flowers.
Once Sacchetti, who graduated from New Milford High School and the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in 1996, reached Seattle, she boarded the icebreaker ship Polar Star for the voyage to Antarctica, where she spent two months.
"It took two months to get there, we spent two months there and it took two months to get home," Sacchetti said.
During her time aboard the ship, Sacchetti celebrated both Thanksgiving and Christmas.
"We had a little Christmas tree," she said. "Because we have a lot of rollovers, we had to strap it down."
One of her first missions in Antarctica was to visit Franklin Island and bring scientists equipment. The crew then went on to McMurdo, which houses a large U.S. military base. Scientists also conduct operations there.
Christine Sacchetti's class, along with third-graders in Melissa Bradicich's class who helped with proofreading the entries the first-graders made in their journals, took on the task of getting questions and correspondence to Andrea Sacchetti from journal to e-mail.
"Teaching is always a collaborative effort," said Christine Sacchetti, who has been a teacher in New Milford for 15 years. "Nancy Nahley, the library and media specialist, was a wonderful help to us for gathering books about the Antarctic and books on penguins, both fiction and non-fiction."
Nahley also helped the class do the T-shirts students were wearing with their penguin and Antarctic continent design. Computer technician Nancy Schindelar helped the class keep track of its correspondence and the pictures Andrea Sacchetti e-mailed. Parent volunteer Lisa Kozar came in each week and helped the children with their writing.
Andrea Sacchetti said the crew had a lot of fun during days off on the ship, with barbecues and movies. Off the ship, crew members took trips to the South Pole, where they were "initiated" by jumping into 35-degree water.
"Everybody immediately came back and went to take hot showers," Sacchetti said.
Crew members also traveled to Australia, where Sacchetti took pictures of the Sydney Opera House and the Australia Zoo in Brisbane. Students were amazed by pictures of kangaroos, koalas, a camel and crocodiles.
There were plenty of questions, with students asking if she got to see Santa ("no, Santa's in the North Pole") and how deep the water was ("almost two miles").
Sacchetti, who has been on active duty for eight years, returned in April to Mobile, where she continues to work. She hopes to transfer to California.
The e-mail messages were a welcome distraction from life aboard the ship. She would field questions about wildlife, what the scientists did and, depending on where she was, what the people were like.
"We had connectivity to e-mail 24 hours a day," Sacchetti said. "It was a big morale booster for the crew, too."